8 ms·

>(...)also its technically possible to get better sound quality than digital via high quality, high speed, vinyl and an all analog recording to stamping process

by lb1lf 10y ago

>(...)also its technically possible to get better sound quality than digital via high quality, high speed, vinyl and an all analog recording to stamping process -This, with all due respect, is a myth. Much as I love my LPs, by any objective criteria the CD (or any digital media) beats them handsomely. Dynamic range, frequency response, noise floor, channel separation - even on the best mastered, half-speed cut, heavy vinyl albums noise and distortion is orders of magnitude larger than on any competently mastered CD. Note 'competently mastered'; it is unarguably true that some recordings are destroyed during mastering for CD as part of the so-called loudness wars; this problem is less of an issue when mastering for vinyl as the audience buying LPs often do so precisely to escape from the loudness wars and the problems caused by it. However, this is a defect by decision; it is not due to any inherent limitation of the CD medium compared to the LP.

semi-extrinsic 10y ago
I thought it was an inherent limitation in LPs (track skipping probability increases with loudness) that meant they are not mastered into oblivion like CDs?
- lb1lf 10y ago
  -If you wanted to, you could master an LP with 0 dynamic range; it would work just fine. (Provided the average signal level was low enough to keep the needle from going haywire attempting to follow the LF grooves) What quickly becomes a problem for LPs is too much energy in the LF/bass region, which will cause the needle to skip and jump all over the place. The RIAA correction curve is a measure to alleviate this problem, as it strongly emphasizes low frequencies on playback (and, inversely, reduces them before cutting the master disc, leaving much less LF content in the grooves than would otherwise be needed for accurate reproduction.) I suspect (Mind, this is just a guess) that when someone says an album has 'a separate master for vinyl', what they are really saying is that someone took a copy of the album master before it was sent through the last loudness war compressor - and sent that copy to the LP plant, using the compressed-as-heck master for any other format.
  - beat 10y ago
    There's a lot more to mastering than "sent through the last loudness war compressor", for cd as well as vinyl. Not a guess - I've sat in the room with a mastering engineer while working and talked to him about it.
    - semi-extrinsic 10y ago
      Do elaborate, please! :)
      - beat 10y ago
        Mastering at album-length is largely about coherence... making a bunch of separately recorded things with often wildly varying sounds sound like a single piece of music. It involves a combination of gentle compression and brickwall limiting, broadband equalization and high-Q deep-cut equalization. Some of it is visual metrics (especially looking for frequency problems), and some of it is just ears. A good master will sound good on any playback equipment. This is where I point and laugh at all the people lauding the "accuracy" of their favorite medium. Speakers and amps are the limiting factor, not the medium! I've been dinged by a mastering engineer for accidentally having a 32hz synth tone (a sub-bass sound) on a mix. He eq'd it away. My mixing system couldn't reproduce it - hardly any can. But it wastes tremendous power and distorts amps and speakers, so out it goes. For cd, it's usually brickwall-limited to no more than 10db max dynamic range (often no more than 6db). This makes things sound "better" on typical playback equipment, which is... not good, compared to the sound of live instruments in a room. Vinyl is a different beast. It needs RIAA equalization on the master (which is reverse-eq'd by the playback equipment) to managed the size of bass grooves and keep the needle from jumping out of the track, and to make the highs physically big enough for the needle to pick up well. Dynamics are constrained by the physical limitations of the media. So it's a separate master. That's not a big deal, though. The constraints of vinyl slot in quite well with the constraints of speakers and amps! This is why vinyl, despite its on-paper inferiority, can sound as good or better than digital. But in the end, it's all about the speakers. I mix on a pair of Tannoy System 12 speakers and an old UREI studio amp that would be the envy of many hi-fi nerds - but I don't consider a mix done until it sounds good on my stock iPhone earbuds and shitty car stereo. Mix to the output, not the medium.
- torrent-of-ions 10y ago
  If anything vinyl has more of a problem with dynamic range. Most LPs are cut with a variable width groove, ie. the grooves are actually cut closer together during softer sections so that more music can be cut on the disc. As long as the groove doesn't pop out (as would happen with a large stereo separation in the low frequency content) or physically meet the other groove then not popping out is just a matter of correctly weighting your cartridge (more weight wears the record out faster, though. So having no dynamic range would actually make it easier to cut and ensure that this doesn't happen.
notahacker 10y ago
Arguably the same process of "competent" mastering that increases dynamic range etc results in a product with less fidelity to how recordings from certain eras were originally enjoyed[1]. There were comparatively few recordings made that were intended to be consumed exclusively on cassette. [1] Granted, it would have been perfectly possible to master CD audio to vinyl's sonic limitations and even introduce artificial noise if sound engineers chose to do so, and plenty of digital players give you some scope to modify dynamic range
- torrent-of-ions 10y ago
  Mastering shouldn't increase the dynamic range. It should rather preserve all meaningful dynamic range, while making the most of the medium.
  - notahacker 10y ago
    Well if we're being strictly accurate it could mean preserve meaningful dynamic range of the master recording in a manner which ensures that it'll sound like it has a greater dynamic range when played using the new output medium than the vinyl recordings which everyone's actually used to listening to the song on. But that's rather cumbersome phrasing amounting to essentially the same thing, besides which I'm pretty sure that in practice a lot of remastering involved actively increasing dynamic range etc. relative to the original master tape because the sound engineers (i) wanted to restore dynamics and other aspects of sound quality lost during the original mastering process and (ii) thought it sounded better and would sell more CDs. I guess ultimately it depends whether it's believed that fidelity to how it sounded to the original sound engineer mixing it in the recording studio or fidelity to how it sounded to a generation growing up listening to records is the priority.
    - beat 10y ago
      Actually, mastering decreases dynamic range, largely to increase apparent volume (apparent volume is RMS, not peak-to-peak. To be very vague, the RMS of 0 to -10 is -5, and the RMS of 0 to -20 is -10. The more dynamic range, the less apparent volume). The intent of the mixing engineer and mastering engineer is to make a recording that sounds good everywhere, not just on studio monitors. When I mix records (I've produced several), I check every "final" mix on cheap earbuds and in my bad car stereo. Sounding good on my very expensive Tannoy studio monitors is meaningless if it doesn't sound good in someone else's car. For that matter, most pop records are mixed on subjectively awful speakers. The most popular pro mixing speaker is the Yamaha NS-10. They sound shrill, piercing, and nasty, with a sharp eq spike right in the 2khz range where ears are most sensitive. If you can make a mix sound good on those, it should sound good anywhere! A lot of mixers also rely on Auratones, which are tiny 5" drivers, often used in mono. No lows, no highs. They're incredibly honest about levels.
UweSchmidt 10y ago
Recently I had the priviledge to hear a high quality LP (Dire Straits - Brothers in Arms) on high-end equipment (100k speakers, 40k amp, 35k Player) and switch back and forth to a FLAC that came from another expensive looking box directly into the same amp. There was a definite difference in quality between the LP and the FLAC file, especially when switching from good (LP) to bad(file). I can only assume but not guarantee that the FLAC file was produced correctly; otherwise the technical environment seemed to be close to perfection. The quality however dropped of considerably with all the other LPs we've tried for many reasons. Quality seems to depend on the recording, mixing and actual physical quality of the LP a lot. This experience changed my view on the issue for now :)
- croon 10y ago
  A lot of people like the vinyl "sound". What do you mean by your usage of "quality"? What was the "expensive looking box"? How was it connected to the amp? Where did the DA-conversion happen? What was the source for the FLAC? I'm sorry, but this is barely even anecdata.
  - UweSchmidt 10y ago
    Didn't mean to prove anything here. I mentioned myself that I can't prove the FLAC was up to par and there might be all sorts of biases at work, who knows. The "box" had the hard disks and DAC inside, don't know the correct term. Connection was with short, chunky cables. We switched back and forth using a switch on the amp without any delay. I wouldn't blame the hardware in this situation. I haven't listened to much vinyl in my life but maybe it subconscioulsy triggers some memories but I do not consciously prefer vinyl in any way and as a contrarian I wouldn't mind calling out BS. Describing sound is hard but I experienced the music a lot better with the LP, would try and call the FLAC "flat, boring, less dynamic" when comparing directly. All I'm saying is, if you get the chance, listen to a good LP on some audiophile's equipment.
    - lb1lf 10y ago
      >All I'm saying is, if you get the chance, listen to a good LP on some audiophile's equipment. This I agree fully with. However, this is also (IMHO) part of vinyl's challenge - the entry cost for getting blow-me-away-results is much, much higher than for a digital system. Now, assuming we use the same speakers (Which, if anything, is the one link in the chain where one should put the most of one's budget!) and amps and are left only with the source part: You can get an excellent DAC for a couple of hundred dollars. If you want something top-of-the-line, inarguably reference-grade, that'll set you back a couple of kilobucks. (There are lots of more expensive DACs; however, at $2k or thereabouts, the Benchmark DAC2 hardly leaves any room for improvement in other factors than user interface and bragging rights.) As for source - with the DAC sorted, you can use just about anything. Laptop. Old CD-player with a digital output. Anything will do. Total cost (excluding amps/speakers) for a reference-grade system: $2,100 or so. For a system which gets you 99% of the way there - $300 or so. (Obviously, these are very rough ballpark figures, intended to stress the point more than anything else.) So, how does the analog side of things look? Good LP players cannot by their very nature be very cheap; there's simply too much precision mechanics about. So, let us say that a 'very good' LP player is the Linn LP12 with no upgrades. That alone appears to set you back in excess of $3k, luckily including what I assume to be a decent, though not stellar pickup. Adding to that, you need a RIAA preamp; disregard the cheapest ones - look inside, and all you'll find is an op-amp, a voltage regulator and a simple second-order filter. Say, (I am just guessing here, having built my own RIAA preamp years ago) - $500-1,000 will get you up from the basic designs and into the realm of things which can do the LP12 justice. Grand total - $3,500-4,000. So, twice the cost of the digital reference - and this is still a -by audiophile standards- very basic analog system with lots of room for improvement. Also, chances are the $300 digital system will run circles around it - even more so if you buy some cheap DSP plugins which can emulate the characteristics of LP playback, giving you an experience closer to what vinyl would sound like. That being said, I fully understand the people who appreciate the tinkering potential of analog systems; you can mix and match accessories and components to a much larger degree than in digital systems, adjust various properties (needle weight; tracking force &c) all influencing the sound; however, when you do that (I do!) you are not necessarily doing it for the sake of faithful reproduction, but rather as a very expensive, very limited way of doing EQ. (Best investment I ever made to my hifi-system: A four-band parametric EQ unit. Sorry, all hardcore audiophiles.)
wazoox 10y ago
There is a special case: dbx discs needing a special, rare decoder seem to sound particularly good: https://www.youtube.com/shared?ci=fPSbhZz2OYU https://www.youtube.com/shared?ci=fPSbhZz2OYU
- beat 10y ago
  Too bad that technology never caught on. It sounded amazing.
beat 10y ago
Dynamic range? Post-mastering, vinyl has a larger dynamic range than any cd. Most cds have no more than 6db real dynamic range. Frequency response? How many people own speakers that can go below 70hz, or can hear about 15khz? (Midrange is where it's at) Noise floor? Ok, I can give cd that one. Channel separation? A/B and you won't hear a difference. Moreover, anyone arguing for "realism" and "accuracy" while blasting the sound of a 100 watt Marshall stack through tinny-sounding earbuds on a recording where an acoustic guitar is louder than the drum kit and the keyboards sound like they were recorded in the Grand Canyon is really, really missing the point.
torrent-of-ions 10y ago
Yeah, it's true that CDs are technically superior. But vinyl is certainly high enough quality that it's good enough. Tape is noticeably low quality. But vinyl records, regardless of their technically deficiencies, sound really good. And, at the end of the day, if music sounds good, it is good.
- lb1lf 10y ago
  I agree fully; I still buy LPs on occasion as I enjoy listening to them more - the whole ritual of getting ready for playback, the large cover you can enjoy while listening.. While not perfect, it is plenty good enough - and, my personal take is that I do not buy <insert media here> to have a perfect reproduction of whatever was created in a studio - I buy <insert media here> to enjoy myself. LPs are brilliant for that purpose.
ewzimm 10y ago
I think it's possible that there's a subjective advantage to the simplicity of vinyl, the fact that the listener can see and easily comprehend some of how it works, and since music is subjective, it's the only quality that really matters. I just had a discussion with some people who know a lot about music who said that vinyl sounded better because it recorded the shape of the sound waves in music. They didn't have an explanation for how CDs or digital formats like FLAC worked other than that they did some kind of incomprehensible digital process to create sound. I argued that all sound has to be coverted to an analog wave in the end, and they were open to the idea, but I think this perception shows that how people understand the process of how music is created affects their perception of it, just like many or most people would say that music sounds better when it is played live, even while being manipulated through electronic equipment, rather than being recorded on electronic equipment and then played.
rusk 10y ago
I listen to vinyl myself, and I also have some limited knowledge of the science involved. I don't claim to be any sort of an expert in acoustics but I do have a basic grounding in DSP from my undergraduate days as well as high-school physics to refer to ... I have to say I enjoy vinyl for a number of non-qualitative reasons. Nostalgia. Tactility. The cover art. The fact that the medium feels like it has more of a "wholeness" to it. My system is fairly modest: A pair of battered Technics turntables plugged through a mixer as preamp into a bog-standard stereo. It's certainly not audiophile quality. But I am constantly struck by how visitors comment on the sound quality when I play my records for them. To a certain extent, I can put it down to a placebo effect, but many often refer to a "warmer" sound. Even with the dust-crackles and occasional pops! There are a couple of things I could think of that could explain it. Firstly is that the accepted human range of hearing is 20 Hz to 20 kHz .. from what I recall of CD sampling it is set at 44.1k samples per-second, twice the dynamic-range in anticipation of Nyquist aliasing. I can't help but wonder if there are "inaudible" frequencies that are chopped out in this scheme. The deep bass-tones that our ears don't pick up but are felt in our body. These frequencies could resonate external physical fixtures perhaps creating a more immersive acoustic experience. I've also heard it been said that these inaudible frequencies can be picked up by the body, in particular the stomach and chest cavity, which could give the sound a more visceral quality. Certainly this is the case in a club or even a lounge setting. Apart from being able to physically scratch and manipulate this would also explain why vinyl has persisted moreso in these environments. Aside from this acoustic hocus pocus there might be a more fundamental reason for perceived qualitative differences, and that is to do with implementation. CD as a technology is sufficiently provisioned to capture the entire range of human audio, but for reproduction you are always at the mercy of your DAC. It's important to remember that when you're listening to digital sound you are listening to an analogue signal that's reproduced by modulating an oscillator, whereas with an analogue recording you're listening to the original analogue signal. This isn't an issue for well built sound system but is that most people's experience? Whereas whenever we listen to records the DAC simply isn't an issue. This may not result in "better" sound but it would make it distinguishably "different". I remember being struck, when repairing one of my turntables just how little electronics there was on the audio line: Pretty much a straight uninterrupted line from the stylus out to the pre-amp. One final thought is that, who even listens to CDs any more? We're so used to listening to music on our phones or computers, from a number of formats at varying compression levels and of varying quality, through poor quality headphones or car stereo systems. It could just be that our expectations have been slowly been lowered by ever decreasing reductions in quality to the point that when we do hear something reproduced as its master intended it is a notable experience.
meredydd 10y ago
There is one criterion on which the LP still wins - time resolution. The human ear can perceive differences in the 5-to-10-microsecond range (you can prove this by testing our ability to work out where a sound came from, based on differences in arrival time at our ears). Successive samples on a CD are 22 microseconds apart - so a CD cannot encode two impulses 5us apart[0]. An analogue medium like vinyl, however, can do just that. Some audio engineers speculate that this is what underlies the supposed "digital sound" - people are in fact identifying a loss of timing information. [0] It gets complicated fast, here - the Nyquist theorem says a CD can easily encode a 5us phase difference between two tones - and if the human ear were a linear device with a strict low-pass filter in front of it, that would be the same thing as a 5us time difference between impulses. But the ear is wickedly nonlinear and seems to "care" about impulses for reasons that make obvious evolutionary sense. Long story short, for all their faults LPs do seem to have distinct advantages over CDs when it comes to time resolution.

by lb1lf 10y ago

semi-extrinsic 10y ago

I thought it was an inherent limitation in LPs (track skipping probability increases with loudness) that meant they are not mastered into oblivion like CDs?

lb1lf 10y ago
-If you wanted to, you could master an LP with 0 dynamic range; it would work just fine. (Provided the average signal level was low enough to keep the needle from going haywire attempting to follow the LF grooves) What quickly becomes a problem for LPs is too much energy in the LF/bass region, which will cause the needle to skip and jump all over the place. The RIAA correction curve is a measure to alleviate this problem, as it strongly emphasizes low frequencies on playback (and, inversely, reduces them before cutting the master disc, leaving much less LF content in the grooves than would otherwise be needed for accurate reproduction.) I suspect (Mind, this is just a guess) that when someone says an album has 'a separate master for vinyl', what they are really saying is that someone took a copy of the album master before it was sent through the last loudness war compressor - and sent that copy to the LP plant, using the compressed-as-heck master for any other format.
- beat 10y ago
  There's a lot more to mastering than "sent through the last loudness war compressor", for cd as well as vinyl. Not a guess - I've sat in the room with a mastering engineer while working and talked to him about it.
  - semi-extrinsic 10y ago
    Do elaborate, please! :)
    - beat 10y ago
      Mastering at album-length is largely about coherence... making a bunch of separately recorded things with often wildly varying sounds sound like a single piece of music. It involves a combination of gentle compression and brickwall limiting, broadband equalization and high-Q deep-cut equalization. Some of it is visual metrics (especially looking for frequency problems), and some of it is just ears. A good master will sound good on any playback equipment. This is where I point and laugh at all the people lauding the "accuracy" of their favorite medium. Speakers and amps are the limiting factor, not the medium! I've been dinged by a mastering engineer for accidentally having a 32hz synth tone (a sub-bass sound) on a mix. He eq'd it away. My mixing system couldn't reproduce it - hardly any can. But it wastes tremendous power and distorts amps and speakers, so out it goes. For cd, it's usually brickwall-limited to no more than 10db max dynamic range (often no more than 6db). This makes things sound "better" on typical playback equipment, which is... not good, compared to the sound of live instruments in a room. Vinyl is a different beast. It needs RIAA equalization on the master (which is reverse-eq'd by the playback equipment) to managed the size of bass grooves and keep the needle from jumping out of the track, and to make the highs physically big enough for the needle to pick up well. Dynamics are constrained by the physical limitations of the media. So it's a separate master. That's not a big deal, though. The constraints of vinyl slot in quite well with the constraints of speakers and amps! This is why vinyl, despite its on-paper inferiority, can sound as good or better than digital. But in the end, it's all about the speakers. I mix on a pair of Tannoy System 12 speakers and an old UREI studio amp that would be the envy of many hi-fi nerds - but I don't consider a mix done until it sounds good on my stock iPhone earbuds and shitty car stereo. Mix to the output, not the medium.
torrent-of-ions 10y ago
If anything vinyl has more of a problem with dynamic range. Most LPs are cut with a variable width groove, ie. the grooves are actually cut closer together during softer sections so that more music can be cut on the disc. As long as the groove doesn't pop out (as would happen with a large stereo separation in the low frequency content) or physically meet the other groove then not popping out is just a matter of correctly weighting your cartridge (more weight wears the record out faster, though. So having no dynamic range would actually make it easier to cut and ensure that this doesn't happen.

notahacker 10y ago

Arguably the same process of "competent" mastering that increases dynamic range etc results in a product with less fidelity to how recordings from certain eras were originally enjoyed[1]. There were comparatively few recordings made that were intended to be consumed exclusively on cassette. [1] Granted, it would have been perfectly possible to master CD audio to vinyl's sonic limitations and even introduce artificial noise if sound engineers chose to do so, and plenty of digital players give you some scope to modify dynamic range

torrent-of-ions 10y ago
Mastering shouldn't increase the dynamic range. It should rather preserve all meaningful dynamic range, while making the most of the medium.
- notahacker 10y ago
  Well if we're being strictly accurate it could mean preserve meaningful dynamic range of the master recording in a manner which ensures that it'll sound like it has a greater dynamic range when played using the new output medium than the vinyl recordings which everyone's actually used to listening to the song on. But that's rather cumbersome phrasing amounting to essentially the same thing, besides which I'm pretty sure that in practice a lot of remastering involved actively increasing dynamic range etc. relative to the original master tape because the sound engineers (i) wanted to restore dynamics and other aspects of sound quality lost during the original mastering process and (ii) thought it sounded better and would sell more CDs. I guess ultimately it depends whether it's believed that fidelity to how it sounded to the original sound engineer mixing it in the recording studio or fidelity to how it sounded to a generation growing up listening to records is the priority.
  - beat 10y ago
    Actually, mastering decreases dynamic range, largely to increase apparent volume (apparent volume is RMS, not peak-to-peak. To be very vague, the RMS of 0 to -10 is -5, and the RMS of 0 to -20 is -10. The more dynamic range, the less apparent volume). The intent of the mixing engineer and mastering engineer is to make a recording that sounds good everywhere, not just on studio monitors. When I mix records (I've produced several), I check every "final" mix on cheap earbuds and in my bad car stereo. Sounding good on my very expensive Tannoy studio monitors is meaningless if it doesn't sound good in someone else's car. For that matter, most pop records are mixed on subjectively awful speakers. The most popular pro mixing speaker is the Yamaha NS-10. They sound shrill, piercing, and nasty, with a sharp eq spike right in the 2khz range where ears are most sensitive. If you can make a mix sound good on those, it should sound good anywhere! A lot of mixers also rely on Auratones, which are tiny 5" drivers, often used in mono. No lows, no highs. They're incredibly honest about levels.

UweSchmidt 10y ago

Recently I had the priviledge to hear a high quality LP (Dire Straits - Brothers in Arms) on high-end equipment (100k speakers, 40k amp, 35k Player) and switch back and forth to a FLAC that came from another expensive looking box directly into the same amp. There was a definite difference in quality between the LP and the FLAC file, especially when switching from good (LP) to bad(file). I can only assume but not guarantee that the FLAC file was produced correctly; otherwise the technical environment seemed to be close to perfection. The quality however dropped of considerably with all the other LPs we've tried for many reasons. Quality seems to depend on the recording, mixing and actual physical quality of the LP a lot. This experience changed my view on the issue for now :)

croon 10y ago
A lot of people like the vinyl "sound". What do you mean by your usage of "quality"? What was the "expensive looking box"? How was it connected to the amp? Where did the DA-conversion happen? What was the source for the FLAC? I'm sorry, but this is barely even anecdata.
- UweSchmidt 10y ago
  Didn't mean to prove anything here. I mentioned myself that I can't prove the FLAC was up to par and there might be all sorts of biases at work, who knows. The "box" had the hard disks and DAC inside, don't know the correct term. Connection was with short, chunky cables. We switched back and forth using a switch on the amp without any delay. I wouldn't blame the hardware in this situation. I haven't listened to much vinyl in my life but maybe it subconscioulsy triggers some memories but I do not consciously prefer vinyl in any way and as a contrarian I wouldn't mind calling out BS. Describing sound is hard but I experienced the music a lot better with the LP, would try and call the FLAC "flat, boring, less dynamic" when comparing directly. All I'm saying is, if you get the chance, listen to a good LP on some audiophile's equipment.
  - lb1lf 10y ago
    >All I'm saying is, if you get the chance, listen to a good LP on some audiophile's equipment. This I agree fully with. However, this is also (IMHO) part of vinyl's challenge - the entry cost for getting blow-me-away-results is much, much higher than for a digital system. Now, assuming we use the same speakers (Which, if anything, is the one link in the chain where one should put the most of one's budget!) and amps and are left only with the source part: You can get an excellent DAC for a couple of hundred dollars. If you want something top-of-the-line, inarguably reference-grade, that'll set you back a couple of kilobucks. (There are lots of more expensive DACs; however, at $2k or thereabouts, the Benchmark DAC2 hardly leaves any room for improvement in other factors than user interface and bragging rights.) As for source - with the DAC sorted, you can use just about anything. Laptop. Old CD-player with a digital output. Anything will do. Total cost (excluding amps/speakers) for a reference-grade system: $2,100 or so. For a system which gets you 99% of the way there - $300 or so. (Obviously, these are very rough ballpark figures, intended to stress the point more than anything else.) So, how does the analog side of things look? Good LP players cannot by their very nature be very cheap; there's simply too much precision mechanics about. So, let us say that a 'very good' LP player is the Linn LP12 with no upgrades. That alone appears to set you back in excess of $3k, luckily including what I assume to be a decent, though not stellar pickup. Adding to that, you need a RIAA preamp; disregard the cheapest ones - look inside, and all you'll find is an op-amp, a voltage regulator and a simple second-order filter. Say, (I am just guessing here, having built my own RIAA preamp years ago) - $500-1,000 will get you up from the basic designs and into the realm of things which can do the LP12 justice. Grand total - $3,500-4,000. So, twice the cost of the digital reference - and this is still a -by audiophile standards- very basic analog system with lots of room for improvement. Also, chances are the $300 digital system will run circles around it - even more so if you buy some cheap DSP plugins which can emulate the characteristics of LP playback, giving you an experience closer to what vinyl would sound like. That being said, I fully understand the people who appreciate the tinkering potential of analog systems; you can mix and match accessories and components to a much larger degree than in digital systems, adjust various properties (needle weight; tracking force &c) all influencing the sound; however, when you do that (I do!) you are not necessarily doing it for the sake of faithful reproduction, but rather as a very expensive, very limited way of doing EQ. (Best investment I ever made to my hifi-system: A four-band parametric EQ unit. Sorry, all hardcore audiophiles.)

wazoox 10y ago

There is a special case: dbx discs needing a special, rare decoder seem to sound particularly good: https://www.youtube.com/shared?ci=fPSbhZz2OYU https://www.youtube.com/shared?ci=fPSbhZz2OYU

beat 10y ago
Too bad that technology never caught on. It sounded amazing.

beat 10y ago

Dynamic range? Post-mastering, vinyl has a larger dynamic range than any cd. Most cds have no more than 6db real dynamic range. Frequency response? How many people own speakers that can go below 70hz, or can hear about 15khz? (Midrange is where it's at) Noise floor? Ok, I can give cd that one. Channel separation? A/B and you won't hear a difference. Moreover, anyone arguing for "realism" and "accuracy" while blasting the sound of a 100 watt Marshall stack through tinny-sounding earbuds on a recording where an acoustic guitar is louder than the drum kit and the keyboards sound like they were recorded in the Grand Canyon is really, really missing the point.

torrent-of-ions 10y ago

Yeah, it's true that CDs are technically superior. But vinyl is certainly high enough quality that it's good enough. Tape is noticeably low quality. But vinyl records, regardless of their technically deficiencies, sound really good. And, at the end of the day, if music sounds good, it is good.

lb1lf 10y ago
I agree fully; I still buy LPs on occasion as I enjoy listening to them more - the whole ritual of getting ready for playback, the large cover you can enjoy while listening.. While not perfect, it is plenty good enough - and, my personal take is that I do not buy <insert media here> to have a perfect reproduction of whatever was created in a studio - I buy <insert media here> to enjoy myself. LPs are brilliant for that purpose.

ewzimm 10y ago

I think it's possible that there's a subjective advantage to the simplicity of vinyl, the fact that the listener can see and easily comprehend some of how it works, and since music is subjective, it's the only quality that really matters. I just had a discussion with some people who know a lot about music who said that vinyl sounded better because it recorded the shape of the sound waves in music. They didn't have an explanation for how CDs or digital formats like FLAC worked other than that they did some kind of incomprehensible digital process to create sound. I argued that all sound has to be coverted to an analog wave in the end, and they were open to the idea, but I think this perception shows that how people understand the process of how music is created affects their perception of it, just like many or most people would say that music sounds better when it is played live, even while being manipulated through electronic equipment, rather than being recorded on electronic equipment and then played.

rusk 10y ago

I listen to vinyl myself, and I also have some limited knowledge of the science involved. I don't claim to be any sort of an expert in acoustics but I do have a basic grounding in DSP from my undergraduate days as well as high-school physics to refer to ... I have to say I enjoy vinyl for a number of non-qualitative reasons. Nostalgia. Tactility. The cover art. The fact that the medium feels like it has more of a "wholeness" to it. My system is fairly modest: A pair of battered Technics turntables plugged through a mixer as preamp into a bog-standard stereo. It's certainly not audiophile quality. But I am constantly struck by how visitors comment on the sound quality when I play my records for them. To a certain extent, I can put it down to a placebo effect, but many often refer to a "warmer" sound. Even with the dust-crackles and occasional pops! There are a couple of things I could think of that could explain it. Firstly is that the accepted human range of hearing is 20 Hz to 20 kHz .. from what I recall of CD sampling it is set at 44.1k samples per-second, twice the dynamic-range in anticipation of Nyquist aliasing. I can't help but wonder if there are "inaudible" frequencies that are chopped out in this scheme. The deep bass-tones that our ears don't pick up but are felt in our body. These frequencies could resonate external physical fixtures perhaps creating a more immersive acoustic experience. I've also heard it been said that these inaudible frequencies can be picked up by the body, in particular the stomach and chest cavity, which could give the sound a more visceral quality. Certainly this is the case in a club or even a lounge setting. Apart from being able to physically scratch and manipulate this would also explain why vinyl has persisted moreso in these environments. Aside from this acoustic hocus pocus there might be a more fundamental reason for perceived qualitative differences, and that is to do with implementation. CD as a technology is sufficiently provisioned to capture the entire range of human audio, but for reproduction you are always at the mercy of your DAC. It's important to remember that when you're listening to digital sound you are listening to an analogue signal that's reproduced by modulating an oscillator, whereas with an analogue recording you're listening to the original analogue signal. This isn't an issue for well built sound system but is that most people's experience? Whereas whenever we listen to records the DAC simply isn't an issue. This may not result in "better" sound but it would make it distinguishably "different". I remember being struck, when repairing one of my turntables just how little electronics there was on the audio line: Pretty much a straight uninterrupted line from the stylus out to the pre-amp. One final thought is that, who even listens to CDs any more? We're so used to listening to music on our phones or computers, from a number of formats at varying compression levels and of varying quality, through poor quality headphones or car stereo systems. It could just be that our expectations have been slowly been lowered by ever decreasing reductions in quality to the point that when we do hear something reproduced as its master intended it is a notable experience.

meredydd 10y ago

There is one criterion on which the LP still wins - time resolution. The human ear can perceive differences in the 5-to-10-microsecond range (you can prove this by testing our ability to work out where a sound came from, based on differences in arrival time at our ears). Successive samples on a CD are 22 microseconds apart - so a CD cannot encode two impulses 5us apart[0]. An analogue medium like vinyl, however, can do just that. Some audio engineers speculate that this is what underlies the supposed "digital sound" - people are in fact identifying a loss of timing information. [0] It gets complicated fast, here - the Nyquist theorem says a CD can easily encode a 5us phase difference between two tones - and if the human ear were a linear device with a strict low-pass filter in front of it, that would be the same thing as a 5us time difference between impulses. But the ear is wickedly nonlinear and seems to "care" about impulses for reasons that make obvious evolutionary sense. Long story short, for all their faults LPs do seem to have distinct advantages over CDs when it comes to time resolution.